Free Sanyo and panasonic unprotected from laptop packs picked from recycling bins ..
Cost .0
bang for your buck .... priceless
I do - one at least. I’ll try to upload it later in the day.
What occurred to me after I threw all the fake 18650 contents away, was that this is actually a remarkably economical way to source cylindrical LiPo pouches in the shape of (roughly) 10280 cells. If you ever needed something like that (say for powering a very strange keychain build), it’s pretty tough to beat the $1.50 that a crap GTL 18650 costs. From my eyeballing, the cylindrical LiPo was almost exactly the diameter of an AA cell, about half as long.
Too bad not all of the li ion bats are not in the analysis. If there was a performance factor included this could be very handy in making purchases. Admittedly, dumpster diving is the cheapest bang for the buck, for those who don’t have dumpsters available this a great approach.
Yeah, me too 
I don’t know if DX sells good ones, but (AFAIK) Manafont does, for $11,70 x2, so $5,85 per cell. Then, mW/$ will be slightly less but still, 1.8 is an excellent result IMO 
Thanks for doing the math, Chigger 
I did some similar calculations on mine some time back. They are more expensive cells tho as the cost was not the primary concern, more like best value premium….
I did many more but interest was limited.
Haven’t seen that thread 
Very interesting, Jeansy, thanks
I actually wanted to do exactly that - recycle cells from used packs.
The challenge for me, was shipping. The cost to get a $7 used pack shipped to Canada was often $25 to $30. If I could have found a batch of 10 to 15 assorted packs, the shipping cost might not have been prohibitive. But for almost every as-is pack I found, the actual cost of buying it and having it shipped to me, put the cells nearly on par with buying new SANYOs.
I think this kind of thread can be very useful. If I was building a big battery pack and didn’t care about size or weight, I’d very much care about mah per $.
Where are these recycling bins?
I imagine they’re as easy to find as those thrift stores that sell barely used high end outdoor apparel for a few dollars. They might be somewhere, but they don’t seem to be around here.
In any case, bigger companies often sell their used computers to recycling companies, so there’s no chance of finding them in a recycling bin.
rhd: thank you for taking the time to do all these tests, and share it here on the forum.
that must have taken you some time!
and I agree with someone else, to see this kind of overview for the little bit more expensive ones, something between $5-10 cells.
I think people would appreciate to see that.
Is t worth the risk of buying any of these batteries? They are all really bad quality with a greater risk of exploding / bursting into flames.
It used to be feasible to find packs in drop boxes. But at least around here, there is so much pressure on recyclers to make sure that batteries are properly recycled, that they won’t give packs to hobbyists. Drop boxes are gone now. Retailers charge recycling fees on all new electronics, and the flip side of that is that they also accept the end of life packs and send them into some incredibly bureaucratic stream of who-knows-what.
The question about whether it’s worth buying these cells?
My response is that if you’re asking that question, then the answer is no. This started with the disclaimer that I had an application where variables other than mAh/$ were controlled for. But if you’re not conscious of the issues related to crap cells, then it’s really just smartest to ignore this thread, and stick to quality. I go for quality myself, typically.
never enough good info
tks
interesting analysis, although somewhat dependent on your application. If you’re only going to be drawing 700mA per cell (even 1A), then most budget/ fake/ recycled 18650s will be fine, excluding the really really bad eBay cells. If you’re going to be drawing >1A per cell, then your Wh/$ figures are going to fall waaay off, to the point that more expensive cells become more economical on that measure. I’ve bought 20 or more Trustfire 2500 blues off DX for various builds and they’re great at <1A per cell, a very reliable 2200-2250mAh. I used a couple in parallel for a single XM-L light at 3A and they crapped the bag. Effective capacity went down to 5-600mAh. Got a couple of NCR18650As at 3 times the price and they gave >3x the capacity at that current.
I’m not saying that you’re wrong or misguided or anything like that, as it’s all useful information, just that the above is worth bearing in mind.
Hey all,
Here’s a rather neat update. I’ve kept on trucking along with the 18650 tests. Another dozen or so cells have come in, and have been put to the test. I got tired of updating the table, but I’ve been writing the true mAh on each cell after testing, and I may just line them up side to side and take some snapshots.
Anyway, here’s the neat gem / outlier. It’s a cell that looks like this (I blurred the seller’s eBay username watermark):
Here’s the remarkable part. It hit 2650 mAh, has protection, and cost $2.78 per cell, shipped. I’ve never seen 2650 mAh from such a cheap cell.
Here’s the funny part. I bought two cells at the same time. In fact, they came shrink wrapped to each other. The second cell, from the exact same pack, measured 1900 mAh.
Of course, the cell claims to be a ridiculous (impossible) 4350 mAh. Such a cell does not exist. In principal, one might be angry at the shortfall. In practice though, 2650 mAh from a sub-$3 cell is amazing. I’m actually fine with 1900 mAh too. But I think this really speaks to the lack of consistency and QC among cheapo cells. If a remarkable 2650 mAh cell is right next to a mediocre 1900 mAh (a ~30% variance in capacity), it’s a pretty strong indication hat these cells are basically all pulls from used laptop packs, with very little quality control or testing. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes it’s a wash.
Thanks for posting. I just calculated my Ultrafire red 3000s to be 1300mah. Good to see that their legit. Kinda good perspective to see wh/$. Kinda keeps you in prespective of bargain 18650s like the AWs & Xtar as well as some…. F. E. Keeppower 3400 mah a good 18650 is .632 Wh/$!
Thx rdh, this is a very useful list the check before ordering 18650s.
I won’t mind carrying a bunch of battery when it saves me bunch of bucks.
the blue ICR 18650 2800 mAh @ only $2.35 shipped? Would you mind posting the source of your tested batteries here?
Feilox,
I thought it is 0.89Wh/$, anyway Keeppower 3400 is expensive in this way.
rhd- Thanks for almost making me spit my drink on my screen. Interesting test too.
Greetings rhd, nice job on this non-mainstream 18650 testing.
Many of us get these ‘cheapo’ batteries included with lights that we have purchased.
It is very handy to know what to expect out of one of these ‘included’ pieces, so we can determine where to best use our battery ‘assets’.
Personally, higher mAh batteries are more valuable to me because of runtime and consistent current flow, not to mention overall product quality and consistent performance.
Regarding the Ultrafires pictured above. Is it a bad or dangerous thing to have 2 batteries with different capacities in series, like your 2 subjects above??
If so, should we need to test each pair of our batteries before packing them into our Trustfire X8’s??
Cheers